As part of a year-in-review process, the Center for Disease Control recently outlined the steps of the Ebola recovery process in the Western African countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
While the disease had a deadly impact in 2015, its spread had already diminished. In January 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the disease had reached a turning point since an estimated peak of 20,000 cases in December 2014.
While the U.S. media attention began to diminish, hundreds of CDC staff responded to the crisis with tenacity, allowing advancement and new discoveries along with the challenges of responding to the epidemic.
New infrastructure and services were put in place to not only increase the ability of Ebola responders, but also to enhance the medical facilities already in place, allowing trials for the development of a possible vaccine to Ebola.
“A safe and effective vaccine would be a very important tool to stop Ebola in the future, and the front-line workers who are volunteering to participate are making a decision that could benefit health care professionals and communities wherever Ebola is a risk,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said. “We hope this vaccine will be proven effective but in the meantime we must continue doing everything necessary to stop this epidemic —find every case, isolate and treat, safely and respectfully bury the dead, and find every single contact.”